The U.N. Is Set to Get Smaller, Glummer and Probably Worse
The United Nations system will hemorrhage staff in the coming months. Reeling from U.S. funding freezes and cuts, U.N. officials are predicting hefty layoffs. The World Food Programme, one of the biggest humanitarian organizations, has warned it will cut a quarter or more of its staff. That amounts to at least 6,000 people. The head of the U.N. refugee agency told the Security Council earlier this week that he also foresees cuts affecting as much as “one-third of its capacity,” implying further layoffs.
This may be only the beginning of a broader process of U.N. reform and contraction. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has announced a system-wide review of budgets and mandates, and has told staff that he wants to reduce “bloat” around the organization’s bureaucracy. In New York and Geneva, even U.N. officials whose posts are not immediately on the chopping block expect the review to propose institutional mergers and measures that will cost more jobs.
While the scope of current and potential U.N. firings will leave many individuals adrift, they could also do more fundamental damage to the expertise and ethos of the organization’s staff. One of the U.N.’s enduring strengths is that it has nurtured an international civil service whose members are formally loyal to the organization rather than to individual states. Since the 1940s, U.N. officials have gone from servicing intergovernmental events to playing a leading role in refining concepts and operational models on issues such as peacekeeping, aid delivery and international development.
The range of tasks that the U.N. carries out means that international civil servants are a varied bunch, ranging from statisticians to hard-charging humanitarian workers. Members of these various subcultures around the U.N. system tend to mistrust each other. Development economists view aid workers as cowboys. Political staff in New York like to think they can feel the pulse of international relations better than experts plugging away in more technical agencies in Geneva. But the full range of this curious mix of international staff is essential to making multilateral cooperation function.
As U.N. cuts and cost-saving measures kick in, the international civil service will not implode completely. But the process of reductions and layoffs is likely to leave those U.N. staff who remain at the organization demoralized and with their prestige dented. That will only add insult to injury, because even before the scale of U.S. cuts became clear, many international officials were already feeling undervalued, for at least three reasons.
For all the current international civil service’s flaws, shrinking it in a half-baked fashion will make it harder for the U.N. to recover from its current moment of crisis.
The most obvious cause of gloom at the U.N. these days is, simply put, the lousy state of the world. As the post-Cold War heyday of international cooperation has faded, the U.N. has appeared gradually less relevant to world affairs. Whereas the Security Council mandated dozens of peace operations in the 1990s and 2000s, it has not launched a new large-scale blue helmet mission since 2014. The U.N.’s own data shows that the organization’s efforts to boost international development and limit global warming are faltering. This is not a very inspiring context to work in.
Second, and closer to home, U.N. officials also worry that neither the organization’s bureaucracy nor U.N. member states are seriously invested in maintaining a strong international service. Thant Myint-U, a former international official, has complained that the U.N. Secretariat fills posts by either hiring subject-matter specialists with little knowledge of the system or promoting U.N. insiders without deep experience of the problems they are meant to solve. Like other big organizations, the U.N. has parceled out a growing amount of work to consultants and other hangers-on.
Meanwhile, influential member states lobby hard to have their nationals—often former diplomats or politicians looking for an interesting second career—placed in top jobs around the organization. While some external appointees are well-qualified, others are less impressive, and long-time U.N. staffers see outsiders blocking their opportunities for promotion.
A third problem for U.N. staffer’s esprit de corps has been the after-effects of COVID-19. When the pandemic struck, most U.N. employees had to work from home, and in New York at least, many have never fully returned to in-person working. Wander some floors of the U.N. building in Manhattan on a weekday afternoon, and you will notice that the rows of desks will be half-empty. Diplomats lament that it has become very hard to pin down U.N. officials for urgent meetings.
Perhaps due to these frustrations, some U.N. members say that the international civil service is due for an overhaul, and that the U.S. funding cuts could force some necessary improvements. But there is a risk that staff cuts will be driven by short-term budgetary factors and internal turf battles, rather than a rational accounting of where the organization needs serious redesigning. Guterres and other senior U.N. leaders have very little time indeed to make hard staffing choices.
For all the current international civil service’s flaws, shrinking it in a half-baked fashion will make it harder for the U.N. to recover from its current moment of crisis. Senior staff with in-depth knowledge of how the system works are liable to jump ship, while ambitious junior staff or young people considering their career options are unlikely to see much of a future in a system that is shedding personnel. Experts on knotty multilateral processes or complex conflicts may be dropped without much thought, leaving less-qualified people to juggle these problems in the future. Those that survive are likely to be risk-averse and anxious to avoid career-threatening hard choices.
The overarching risk is that, once the U.N. has weathered this wave of cuts, its various departments and agencies will become more conservative and less willing to innovate than before. Done right, unavoidable U.N. reforms could be a pathway to rationalizing parts of the organization. Done wrong, and they could bring out U.N. staff’s worst bureaucratic tendencies. That would be a problem not only for the U.N., but also for its member states—and the vulnerable people around the world who benefit from the vital work it does.
Richard Gowan is the U.N. director of the International Crisis Group. From 2013 to 2019, he wrote a weekly column for WPR. Follow him on Twitter at @RichardGowan1.